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OpenOffice.org

Cedric Bosdonnat has been tracking contributions to LibreOffice since its announced fork from OpenOffice.org. He uses Git Data Miner to gleen results from the main branch of LibreOffice Git repositories. Git Data Miner is more commonly known as the tool used by Jonathan Corbet in his periodic kernel code reports.

OpenOffice.org Draw is all about objects -- items inserted into a document, each of which can be edited independently. In fact, whether you insert a picture from a file or create an object selected from the primitives (basic shapes) in the Drawing toolbar, everything in Draw is a frame. Even text in Draw is an object, and behaves differently from ordinary text in Writer.

Some people insist that OpenOffice.org should be called an office application instead of an office suite. The distinction that they are trying to make is that the programs in OpenOffice.org share a common code base, instead of being separate programs that are simply bundled together, the way that Microsoft Office's are.

Most users interact with OpenOffice.org on the desktop. But what if you need to do a selective restore on the files that store custom gradients or colors? Troubleshoot why an extension won't install? Share resources with other users? For these kinds of tasks, you need to know a bit about where OpenOffice.org stores its files, and what you can do with them.

Every few weeks, I like to browse the OpenOffice.org Extensions site to see what is available, and what people are using.
New extensions that are both useful and well-designed seem to be getting few and far between. However, if you search patiently, you can still find extensions worth trying.